Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis.
In 1940, he enrolled at Cornell University as a biochemistry major and contributed to the Cornell Sun as managing editor and columnist.
After enlisting in the Army in 1943, he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge while he was a battalion scout and later released in 1945.
Upon his return, he was awarded a Purple Heart. Later that year he married Jane Marie Cox whom he had first met in kindergarten.
Vonnegut took a job in 1947 with the General Electric Company Research Laboratory in Schenectady as a public relations writer.
Then in 1950, his first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," was published.

I'm not sure how he escaped my notice all those years, but I've only just recently discovered Kurt Vonnegut. I
picked up a battered paperback copy of Slaughterhouse 5 at a church rummage sale in London last summer. What
the heck, I thought, it's only £0.20 (about 47 cents in real money, i.e., Canadian dollars). It turned out to
be one of the best investments of my life. Since then, I've been reading anything and everything I can find by
Vonnegut. He's one of those rare authors claimed by both sides -- SF and the mainstream -- as one of their
own. In other words, some of his work is mainstream fiction while some is undeniably SF, but it's all good enough
that the literary snobs will try to deny that the SF actually is SF.

The Sirens of Titan is #18 in the SF Masterworks series from Victor Gollancz' Millennium
imprint. It's definitely in the SF category. And although it's only the second novel Vonnegut published, it doesn't
suffer from authorial immaturity. He's the kind of writer who didn't need to take a few books to get warmed up; he
was born fully formed into the world of published works.

The Sirens of Titan is centrally concerned with the meaning of life.
Or rather, the meaninglessness of life. Winston Niles Rumfoord is a wealthy playboy who takes his privately
funded spaceship and drives it straight into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, just to see what will happen. He
also takes his dog along for company. What happens is that he is smeared from here to the far end of the
galaxy. He and his dog materialize -- or mostly materialize -- whenever their waveforms intercept Earth or some
other similar obstacle in the vast vacuum of space. From the perspective of "punctual" humans, Rumfoord and
Kazak (the dog) appear at their former home in Newport, Rhode Island, for about an hour once every 59
days. From Rumfoord's perspective, however, time no longer has quite the same meaning.
Rumfoord, you must understand, is now able to see everything that ever has happened or will happen. This puts
him in a rather unique position to create his own religion, complete with guaranteed miracles, since he is
effectively able to predict the future with 100% accuracy. Based on his new and fairly complete comprehension
of the universe, the religion he creates is the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

I won't divulge any more of the plot for those who haven't yet had the pleasure. Suffice it to say that
The Sirens of Titan is a good example of Vonnegut's style: it's thoroughly infused with his satiric
wisdom, dark humour, and clever charm. If you still haven't tried Vonnegut, this is as good a place as any
to start -- and it's worth a lot more than 47 cents. A bargain at any price.